


Astrolabe

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Banned Together Bingo 2020, Blood and Gore, Brain Damage, Cis Peter Lukas, Clothed Sex, Come as Lube, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dissociation, Eye Gouging, Eye Trauma, Forced Orgasm, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Episode: e154 Bloody Mary (The Magnus Archives), Rape as discipline, Rape to Teach a Lesson, Skullfucking, Supernatural Healing, Trans Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Trans Male Character, Vaginal Fingering, Vitreous Humor as Lube, as in the eye socket penetration kind, eye socket fingering, potential body horror, questionable anatomy except the questions are “why did you make that anatomically accurate??”, sex is in chapters 2 and 3, since APPARENTLY there can be ambiguities, speaking of eating: light references to Jon’s season 4 disordered eating, the answer is: you’re welcome, ‘a kNIFE!’
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:48:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28699428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: Jon pulls a breath in, ragged at the edges. The compulsion, at least, is always with him now, cool comfort that it is. “What do I have to do to stop you?”“You know,” Peter says, sounding meditative, “I have absolutely no idea,” and the thoughtfulness in it carries through when he taps the knife ever so lightly against the open curve of Jon’s excruciatingly wide eye.It turns out Peter heard about Jon's ambitions to quit his job. He's not impressed. But he's sure it can be a learning experience overall.
Relationships: Peter Lukas/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52
Collections: Rusty Kink





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’m close enough to done with pt. 3 that (not to jinx myself or anything…) I plan to update every other day or so. Which is a great reversal from [how the first draft filling the skullfucking prompt on the kinkmeme has been going for me](https://rusty-kink.dreamwidth.org/1380.html?thread=122980#cmt122980). 
> 
> The American Academy of Ophthalmology has very good public resources on enucleation, without which I would not have had anything like this much of an idea of exactly what not to do! (Heads up for graphic process and post-procedure photos. The normal amount of blood really is wild to think about.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fills `Too Realistic`.

“So Martin tells me you were considering doing something just _immensely_ stupid.”

Jon recognized Peter’s voice well enough from the relevant tapes; but there’s still something extra, that’s not quite captured secondhand, twining brightly around the shallow fast-paced flippant indifference in play. Maybe it’s just the personal element here, that, regardless of tone, Jon’s unavoidably aware of the much more relevant violence in the fact that he’s having this conversation forced to his knees with a knife to his eye.

“Now,” Peter goes on, “just to be clear, he _did_ also say he talked you out of it. Which is all well and good. Definitely better than the alternative! But I can’t exactly be sure just because he’s said so, can I?” (It does occur to Jon, with a distant sort of absurdity, to wonder if the lean toward rhetorical questions—he _did_ get the general message that Peter’s intent was toward more one-sided conversation, and that he was more than willing to enforce it as such; at least, Jon had gotten the gist after some trial and error on the subject—is just a factor of how much Peter’s presumably relegated to talking to himself. Jon doesn’t ask. In different circumstances, he does think he’d be more than slightly tempted.) “I mean, it _is_ a bit my role here to look after you where I can—”

“You’re doing an odd job there,” Jon says, after thinking better of it. His breath hitches into silence, immediately, at the answering almost-invisible flash of light in his periphery Jon realizes is the blade turning. Just… silent commentary, a reminder of why Jon’s still in this position with his understanding of the matter at the apparent mercy of Peter’s attention span in the first place.

“Shut up, Archivist.” But he sounds, if possible, even more dissonantly cheerful about it, leaves being serious to the switchblade. “Anyway, as I was saying—and you’re _really_ just proving my point here—I _was_ warned that you couldn’t be trusted with any kind of self-preservation when there’s a chance to do something idiotic to hand. And I’m not like you lot!”

There’s a pause there, where Jon could interject to ask what the hell he means; would very much like to, in fact. But he suspects, with no small amount of distaste at the sheer _condescension_ this adds to the whole threats of unexpected and unprecedented violence thing they have going already, that Peter means it as some small test. So Jon—breathes, mostly, tries not to think about the future outside how he knows he can survive.

And he’s proven to be right soon enough; Peter makes a vague approving sound at his silence—Jon wonders, inanely, how Martin manages to _live_ with this, before that distraction evaporates into cold, unhelpful guilt regarding what else he knows about how Martin’s had to live—and continues. “Elias, for instance— _he_ could just check in on your mind to make sure that what Martin says is true and you’re not going to… well, you know. Just throw away every one of those sacrifices people made to keep you around this long.”

Jon swallows the sudden hatred that brings, the abruptly renewed urge to speak or run or—but he’d gotten, and speaking of _sacrifices_ , an abject reminder of just how weak Jon’s own restraint has made him, just now; it leaves his fingers limp and an awareness of the floor pressed hard into the bones of his knees. But that framing—how dare he. How _dare_ he, save easily, and with Jon having no real hope to stop him.

The knife strokes up and down Jon’s temple, not cutting, very mindful of the flat of the blade; gentle, almost, a motion that could be soothing in a completely different universe. Harmless even now, save for what it does to Jon’s pulse. Just as long as he doesn’t move.

Jon is immensely, breathlessly grateful that he doesn’t have to blink. (Though it really is odd, in a way—his thoughts still periodically scattering with dissonant panic whenever Jon’s not holding them in place—that everyone who’s pulled a knife on him before went for the throat, when there’s something more important and more vulnerable right here.)

“No,” Peter says, “the way I see it, I’ve got two options here. I can just _trust_ you—” He drags the idea out in a way that’s an insult in and of itself, so elaboration’s redundant, though it seems like a guarantee he’d relish that too— “Or I can get, well… some sort of proof. Enough to sort of qualify as due diligence, at least, you know? And even if trusting you weren’t an easy way to make the worst mistake of someone’s life…”

Jon doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t. Of course Peter’s trying to rile him, of course what he thinks of to go for is relationships in every sense available. Jon’s thought worse of himself this week, whether or not it makes a difference in theory to hear from a third party instead.

“I’m really more the hands-on type, anyway,” he says, and, like he can’t resist the cheap punctuation there either, Peter’s off hand moves to bracket Jon’s face as well, the dry hot palm pressing lightly against his other temple, cutting off that side’s peripheral vision if Jon had any reason for its use anyway, and Jon—

Jon flinches. Not far and not badly, gets control of himself back almost instantaneously; but it presses his flesh hard against the knife, still the flat of the blade but just by luck. Edges digging into the soft, fragile skin, but lightly enough to only bring out what Jon knows automatically will be fine straight cuts for mere minutes once he can move away. They won’t bleed. He doesn’t do that much any more.

And Peter laughs. “Awful self-control you’ve got, Archivist.” He slides his free hand back a bit, enough to let the fingers tangle in Jon’s hair in a deeply concerning way; enough for leverage to tilt him back away from the knife. “Just awful. Really not a good sign.”

His hand moves in a way it takes Jon a second to understand; Jon’s eyes still have to cross to watch the tendons in Peter’s wrist work and follow them down to what little he can see of the switchblade’s handle, watching it shift, knife angling blessedly away—and then closer, a bright blurry arc across Peter’s fingers like he’s aiming the point toward Jon’s eye and Jon’s voice breaks there if the frantic stillness doesn’t: “Wait,” Jon says, dry at first and then sliding wildly across his register, “ _Wait_ , no, no, I—”

Peter does—stops, just that, knife balanced parallel to Jon’s cheekbone, point angled in; just close enough to see and direly out of focus. Terribly bright. “You?” he prompts, after a heartbeat there.

Jon pulls a breath in, ragged at the edges. The compulsion, at least, is always with him now, cool comfort that it is. “What do I have to do to stop you?”

“You know,” Peter says, sounding meditative, “I have absolutely no idea,” and the thoughtfulness in it carries through when he taps the knife ever so lightly against the open curve of Jon’s excruciatingly wide eye.

The tip scratches the bridge of Jon’s nose, just slightly, where his glasses don’t sit any longer. Jon can’t quite tell if there’s a further stinging scratch across the cornea, his otherwise sharp awareness temporarily scrambled against panic and the two-sided hot welling tears as a high despairing noise he does in fact know well by now hitches in his throat. His fingers curl. “Wh— Why are you doing this?”

“Mm.” At the edge of Jon’s field of vision, he can see Peter cock his head. “Like I said. I can’t just know if you’ve actually been dissuaded from pulling some stupid stunt just by your say-so, right?”

“I’m not— I’m not,” Jon says, pleads, doesn’t particularly have much say in how his voice ends up handling this desperation. “I don’t— Martin was— right, he’s _right_ , I’m not going t—”

“Archivist.” Peter’s voice is chiding. Disappointed, gently so, in counterpoint to the switchblade teasing just against Jon’s lower eyelid. “Shh. What did I _just_ say. Nothing you tell me can actually matter here! I’m not going to be able to believe you! And you may not be my primary concern while I’m here, but I’m still sure Elias didn’t trust me with his…” The blade wanders down to Jon’s cheekbone while Peter considers terms, or possibly just jerks him around more; back up when he speaks. “With _you_ , now, just for us to get complacent. Certainly not when he’s got so little left.”

So much of that makes rage of varying genres boil under Jon’s sternum, sick and sour and liable to roll over into guilt if he lets it, but out loud it just catches in his throat. “What are you going to do to me?” Could Jon even lie if he ever _wanted_ to? He’s hardly tried, which feels like its own sort of evidence, but—that’s not the point, he thinks belatedly. He has the sinking conviction that punishment, a display of some kind, just for its own sake, is the point. That he should have realized that earlier and has squandered a chance to work with knowing it. But maybe that can be its own kind of controllable; something to endure is something to experience. Maybe—

“I am _going_ to make you understand that you don’t actually want all that to happen,” Peter says. “Not in real life. Not for what it would actually take to _do_ , see, dying after aside. I think learning by doing is our best bet here. Now stop stalling and hold still.”

“No,” Jon says, not focused much on the words, just needing to do something about it. His hands are shaking at his sides and he’s aware, has been well aware, that no one could intervene if they wanted to. Feels it in the grind of tinnitus through the bones of his skull under Peter’s hand.

“Yes,” Peter says, almost like he’s humoring him, still with the disappointed tone. “I’d think, really,” he adds, “you would at least _want_ to know.” It does not escape Jon that the grip on his hair has tightened beyond a suggestion, that the knife is drawing back in in what’s a uniquely discouraging way, that—

Jon doesn’t mean to grab Peter’s wrist. He doesn’t think about doing it. It makes sense _to_ do, certainly, at this point, if he can’t talk his way into less than is implied by the switchblade in the first place, but he doesn’t think he chose it as much as just found himself, more or less, holding the hand and knife he can’t quite see at bay. “No,” he says, more or less.

But his grip would be weak even if Jon weren’t shaking; the bones of his fingers hurt. Now, still, the usual—the way he’d maybe thought to get away from; the way they have for weeks, now, he’s used to it—and Jon doesn’t usually grip things poised to object to the practice.

“I’m going to—look, it’s more than you deserve, honestly, but I am in some ways still a guest here, so—I’m going to give you one chance to let go of me,” Peter says, very mildly; it has not escaped Jon that he could, in fact, just stab him outright. “I’d suggest you take it. Don’t make any of this more difficult than it needs to b— well, than you already have.”

Jon swallows. “Why _should_ I?”

Peter sighs when that question hits, and Jon can just barely catch the motion when he shakes his head. “Come on, Archivist. There’s plenty of people in the building who can’t heal what you do, and we both know you don’t actually need them.” He gives Jon a moment with it. “That’s better. Ready?”

“I—” Jon’s throat no longer seems inclined to work. “I d—”

“Do stop answering,” Peter says, pleasant, and, as it goes from inside Jon’s focal distance to something else, the knife crosses that tiny unbridgeable gap and lodges in Jon’s eye.

The collapse into monocular vision is about as unspeakable as the pain for him; Jon screams, of course, unthinking, a guttural sound that feels almost awful enough in itself to draw his attention away from his face; and the reflex to try to cringe away from the intrusion is there in force as well. Enough to make Peter’s grip on Jon’s hair, further shifted at some point to be far beyond negotiable, a mercy, relatively speaking. It keeps Jon from buckling in a direction that would drag the blade somewhere unintended, take the relatively shallow jab and end up with it lodged against bone from the inside after slicing his bloody eyeball in half or…

His eyelids are a loss, though, blinking more than automatic even for him when there’s something in— _in_ , and the fine skin that shreds itself in what’s almost Jon’s own fault is a hot sharp counterpoint of somewhat-comprehensible pain as more of Jon than not works to classify the wider experience, a lopsided pulse of sick agony that’s otherwise frozen in time.

“Oh god,” his mouth says as this goes on, that and other assorted things; as his hands curl and uncurl spasmodically, while his spine doesn’t bow only because he’s being held in place otherwise. 

It occurs to him alongside the rest, quick and muddled and meaningless in a way that feels infinitely slow in practice, that he’s not _bleeding_ , not really, that he should be. Maybe something oozes around the edges of wounds, but even supernatural proprioception seems to cut out earlier than that. He’s got enough to handle otherwise, under and around the pain and the suppressed reflex to vomit, already wondering what on Earth comes next. 

Jon’s sight folded in on itself—it’s odd, under the horror, which is something to sustain himself on—in an instant from an unfocused cross to just the one eye turned painstakingly inward; and nonsensical bursts of color without light from the other. He can see, sort of, the angle of Peter’s hand and the rest of the knife, until it’s obscured by Jon’s own nose; he can gag convulsively on a thicker sob and feel the way his eye rolling to keep up with the other’s attempts to see pulls it back and forth against the otherwise stationary blade. So more of this he’s doing to himself, Jon thinks, knowing it’s wrong and latching onto it anyway. And: “Oh god, oh god, oh _fuck_ ,” more or less.

“I’ll give you a minute?” Peter offers. From very far away, and very much not moving, at all. “That _is_ just the tip, though.”

Said tip is lodged in at an angle; Jon finds that he can interpret sensations into more knowledge of what’s going on than he should ever have had, or the sensation interprets itself, despite how paradoxical that seems in the hot incoherent press of the fact that he can’t resolve it into _feeling_.

The pain’s a nonsensical cacophony superimposed on itself. Jon can know the knife’s tilted under his iris, and gets no idea why, and little understanding of why and how it hurts, save that it does in a way that leaves no room for a sense of self beside it. After an interval there it also occurs to Jon to know he’s deserted his words, that a workable description of the noise he’s making may be _keening_ , though that seems inefficient—he’s grimly certain there’s room for worse, under the high hitching uneven broken sounds that catch in his throat until the next breath knocks them out.

And his eyes—sort of—are still watering, or trying to; but that’s hardly surprising.

Peter says something that’s likely to himself in intent as well as in effect, and turns the blade, levering outward as it rolls, forcing another wave of sick comprehension in a second: Jon suspects he may have just gotten a truly unique understanding of the lens as it popped out under strain, but there’s precious little he can do with knowing that.

Jon chokes on it, the knowing; no idea where the chunk of eye itself goes. He’s hardly going to be able to _see_ it, and it’s not like it matters, but it’s something to think that he manages to and so it sticks in his mind for what fractions of a second it lasts.

The burst of aqueous humor that splatters against his cheek feels much like tears itself, maybe a bit cooler, and there’s something continuously hysterical about this anatomical precision, as his eye tries to close again and the force shreds the surrounding skin a bit further, from a novel angle. “Are— Are you— I—” _I understand,_ he wants to say, throat closing on it instead. _I understand, please,_ his scalp burning, distantly, with the torque keeping Jon from leaning, from collapsing, all the way into the knife.

“All right, stay with me,” Peter says, and after a moment Jon even hears him. He pulls the blade back but not all the way out, somehow managing to have an almost critical air about doing it. “You don't get to tune out already, we’re just getting started. Do I _actually_ need to tell you to pay attention?”

Jon wants to curse at him, to say something appropriate to how many levels that manages to be demeaning on. He wants to want to. He wants a great many things. (The last time he wanted to _run_ this badly at least his adversary wanted him in one piece. Jon doesn't want to be back there, still, there must be worse fates than this, except—except something. He doesn't know. The thought unspools away from him.) The delay between Jon and the present that might've served to insulate him is ebbing, little lurches by which pain comes closer to matching up with motion, but there's no room left inside it for him to do much of anything.

“Just hopeless, honestly,” Peter says, “but I guess that is better,” and just like that he sets to carving out Jon’s eye with the knife. 

This, Jon thinks, with perfect, lancing clarity: this is it. This is what he can’t do. He can’t do this. He can’t do this. (Is he saying it out loud now?) He can’t—

When the blade begins to turn he stops thinking for a while. Finds he isn’t sure, beyond the raw burning anchor of emptying pain, what his body’s doing. 

He's supposed to be holding still, anyway, Jon thinks, after another long moment. It turns out memory very slightly outstrips defiance. He has to take this, because Peter threatened people who can't. 

Part of him knows, really knows, remembers, that there’s no way the Eye will leave him like this, not now; the rest of Jon doubts, and he supposes with bitter resignation in the back of his mouth like bile that, for something like him, this qualifies as faith. It’s not enough to help in any way he recognizes. Not when all of him, by contrast, is fixed in the present, on the knife.

Peter settles into something more systematic as he finishes what Jon unintentionally started as far as the scraps of skin he’d had for eyelids go. He ignores Jon himself save to hold him in place; every so many strokes he forces Jon’s head to a slightly different angle, apparently for his own convenience. 

The first time he hits bone—a hard, jarring, different texture of pain, concussive and sharp and bright, woven into the ache and slice and tear—Peter pauses for long enough that Jon wonders if it was a mistake. Then he just turns out to be using it for leverage, angling the tip of the blade more harshly, and every time it happens it’s a little less distinct when it vibrates through Jon’s nerves.

(It occurs to him to try to keep time that way, and he fails; he knows, he thinks, that this is nowhere near as long as it _feels_ , but that hardly does anything for him that's real.)

That process of rendering what had been Jon’s eye a shapeless mess is both haphazard and patient. When Peter starts focusing on what Jon knows—Knows, probably, given the extra jolt of strain to the thought, more physical than fear—to be the muscle holding the eyeball in, the knife scrapes against the bone from the inside as well.

Somewhere in there Jon’s voice gives out for a while; it seems to go in waves, whether he begs or curses or does nothing, a few breaths each. At one brutal twist that actually ends with Peter pulling his hand back until the knife’s free of Jon’s face, Jon— finds himself thinking about anatomy, still, but outside being overinformed of the mechanics of his present violation. He thinks dully of the fact that the pupil is a hole, and the damage, however otherwise senseless, radiates from the center out; like that nothingness expanding past the point of being able to tell him anything any more. 

It is, he more finds he believes than really has to think, the worst thing in the world. As if there were just Jon and nothing greater and he was stuck with no power and no reason worth pursuing, and: there. There is the moment Jon admits what he is, and that he is a coward. Not for the first time. Perhaps not for the last, if he keeps being this incapable of learning to remember when he could suffer a reminder and have to pay for that instead. But he is particularly a coward here, he _can’t do this_ , he can’t, and Jon realizes as the thought spirals with him locked at the center that he’s finally cycled back to speaking; that he doesn’t know how long he’s been babbling at Peter that he understands now and would do anything, _will_ do anything but—

“Really would’ve expected you to be quicker on the uptake, all things considered,” Peter says, cutting through him. “I told you that I can’t believe just anything you say, Archivist. You’re not going to be able to convince me, that would be _negligence!_ The way I see it, the only option I’ve got is finishing the lesson.” But he pulls the knife away again, and adds, “You’re getting better at holding still, thought. Definite improvement there.” 

Jon doesn't have much of a choice in the matter, whether he's more or less quiet or whether the shivering escalated arbitrarily into abortive full-body spasms again, but if it makes Peter decide they're finished here he'll take it, he'll take anything. At his second try Jon manages to force his jaw shut, swallows the odd desperate whine for a while. And hopes. 

Hopes more, then, when he hears more than manages to see Peter set the knife aside entirely. He drags Jon’s face up and to the side to get, apparently, a different view, and Jon tries, actively tries to let him. Peter makes a considering sound—not words, Jon can still tell that much—that might be approval, and Jon clings weakly to that too, to anything pointing to an end. It largely comes as a surprise to him when Peter’s other hand (unarmed, now, which helps less than it should) comes back round to the side of Jon’s face. Jon feels flashes of it, off and on, dry details of foreign skin and wet mulched agony, as Peter thumbs over the damage, smears pulped eye and tattered skin back and forth. Thinks it must mean _something_ that his touch is very light. 

“And none of it’s healing for you at all, right?” Peter asks, unnecessary and conversational; conversational for Peter, that is, which is to say Jon doesn't reply coherently and would likely be made to regret it more, somehow, if he tried. “Thought so. There's only so much the gods can do for us, you know? And then that much less if you try to break your faith with them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 2/3 ETA mid-week.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Suffice to say: fills `Gore`.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warning for some lobotomy mentions this chapter (including method), by way of metaphor.
> 
> There were _multiple_ points in the original kinkmeme draft where, to my chagrin, I got too excited about a mental image and didn’t finish the actual sentence it was in. I think I’ve gotten to all of them on this revision. If you hit something that looks like it wants to be a paragraph and has failed to be a paragraph, though, feel free to let me know. (Absolutely typical that I accidentally skip over things not because I don’t know what’s there but because I _know and am thinking about it too hard_ , istg.)

Jon’s still wondering hazily what exactly he's meant to take away from that as Peter repositions him yet again, thinks he's long past fighting how his head’s coaxed and then forced into different angles as long as it keeps him upright. He's even still wondering—everything inside him that isn't pain is so muddled and so slow—when Peter takes his bare hand instead and starts pulling out the remains of Jon’s eye with his fingers.

“It's really on you that this is going so badly for you,” he goes on, over the novel wounded-animal sounds he's pulled out of Jon as well. Teasing out the remarkably intact capsule with… really no finesse whatsoever, but, then again, finesse barehanded wouldn't make it hurt any less; maybe it's a mercy that Peter’s at least more than unhesitating enough to tear off the scraps of muscle still anchoring the shredded remains of Jon’s eye, what his rummaging about with the knife still hadn't managed to fully sever somehow.

Maybe Jon’s just _that_ desperately grasping at straws: for something, anything, to think about, for the slightest of hints that this will stop on a timeframe he's capable of imagining, even as that window narrows by the minute.

“I mean, it is,” Peter says, like Jon actually had registered any coherent dissent there. His hand stills while he's speaking, set incongruously with fingertips inside Jon’s face, almost an improvement. “Your… really stupid ideas wouldn't be hurting you this much in practice if you didn't make yourself weak first. And—”

This time Jon does try to say something, sputtering humiliated anger making it through the fog for a moment, not long enough to be coherently original. Not long enough to be coherent, really, full stop.

“I'm talking, Archivist. Hush. This is pathetic to watch! Which is, quite honestly, your kind of thing, not mine? But—anyway—my point is that you did this to _yourself_. Not just with the stupid stunt you didn’t pull. You made yourself weak.” His voice gentles, which is worse. “Any predator that didn’t have your best interests in mind could’ve noticed. You’re very lucky I got to you first.”

Then he starts fingering the rest of Jon’s decidedly ruined eye out.

And it's a new kind of pain (how is it always managing to be a fucking new kind of pain? How does Jon have this many textures of sick agony inside him apparently just waiting to be evoked?) just as surreally clear as the rest, because Jon doesn't get to have mercifully fallible human nerves when he can instead map _this_ , he gets to know what it feels like to have fingers scrape about the inside of the cornea—almost definitely unique, that—little curling motions that quickly cake the side of his face in slick jellied vitreous.

Getting his hands more literally dirty seems to make Peter talkative. More so. Jon catches something else about this not being his sort of thing for the most part, not traditionally; but, he says, with much of what comes next lost to the physical result, he’s definitely seeing a kind of appeal, and he gets enough of a grip on something—Tenor’s capsule, Jon thinks, another little stab—to pull the whole ragged thing out instead.

This is precisely backward even aside from the grotesque methods. Enucleation leaves the eyeball intact, or nearly so, for people who can afford it to. Even though the reason is obvious, Jon still thinks it through, and so Knowing that, in itself, is enough to cause him more lancing, jagged pain, all hunger-pangs-meet-migraine, urgent and sharp enough to force his attention to split. Jon _hurts_ at a level far beyond his physical eyes, but with a feedback loop between the two. Like the same self-fulfilling circuit he tries to edge away from when boredom and hunger make him wonder things, a death spiral of pained wrongness. The knowledge of the damage that he won’t be able to see and shouldn’t be able to feel as inhumanly obvious as how he knows no one’s going to know, or care, or come find him, before this has run its course.

At the neck-straining angle Peter’s got him—still the better, Jon supposes miserably, to see what he's doing—the odd trickle of blood that makes it into other cavities of Jon’s skull drips either straight down the back of his throat or, less often, out of his nose. There's just enough to be moistening his upper lip, so he tastes it not only when he swallows or breathes too harshly but when he (still) tries to speak. Peter shushes him again. Tells him he's _working_. There's almost definitely something properly nasty Jon could muster in response, if only his words were working right.

Then there's confused, insistent tugging that Jon realizes isn't just against the muscle but the optic nerve itself, and he both does and doesn't understand before it happens. Which is: twisting, pinching, squeezing at the myelin there, Peter’s fingers worrying the nerve apart by millimeters until the slick wiry mess pulls free. The pain inside Jon’s face no less consuming but suddenly slack.

So he’s emptier, now. His ears are ringing, like he has room in his mind to feel dizzy with.

(The last cohesive remains of Jon’s eyeball just _drop_ from Peter’s fingers, completely indifferent, and Jon doesn't get a good enough cross-eyed half a view to tell that's what Peter’s done before a formless wet mass hits his thigh and then the floor. He’ll have to clean that up later, Jon thinks, more than a bit hysterically; presuming he survives long enough, he wouldn't want to leave it for anyone who could still feel scarred about it, would he?)

“There we go!” Peter says, as Jon tries to catch his breath. (He doesn't think he can actually, meaningfully _feel_ air on the opened inside of his eye socket—doesn't think it's more than psychosomatic for his face to feel, behind the pain and confusion, that level of sheer detail—but if anyone had to be able to map that sort of tattered wet flesh by inhabiting it, Jon supposes it's him.) “Do you think you're starting to get the idea?”

His head feels unbalanced, air unseasonably cold on damp and worse than damp skin, listing with the illusion of being lopsided in weight as well as appearance. It's really not. The mass of the eye is—negligible, relatively speaking. Jon doesn't have to Know that, which would be a small mercy were it not for the fact that it’s because he felt how little of a difference it made when it bounced off his leg. He feels lopsided and carved out anyway, one side of him too thick and heavy to think with, the other a slick mess emptied of meaning.

He wants this to be over so, so much, in a hollow droning kind of way: the idea of stopping started ebbing away from him at some point and all he can think is that it may be _finished_. When he breathes through his mouth it rasps.

Jon does, actually, try to say _Yes,_ the desperate kind of likely-false hope embodied in answering any question at all managing to trump both precision (he's literally said—) and anger. It ends up immaterial, he chokes on it instead: just as he’s wondering what more there even is to say or know, suspicious dread building every second that grip stays unshakably on his hair, there’s his answer.

He’d lost track of the hand not holding him in place, hanging comfortably somewhere in that whole-hemisphere blind spot forced into him. So it comes entirely as a surprise when Peter forces the same two fingers into him again, hooking into Jon’s face, into what’s finally just a ragged hole.

This, this was the kind of thing he’d have wanted to save the word _keening_ for, that specific a gutted, thready, high-pitched noise, like the grating whine of his soul pulled out on piano wire through his teeth if he had one—

“See, this, this is progress,” Peter says, _gently_ , and Jon can’t breathe for how much he wants to kill him. ‘Progress’ appears to mean digging into him by blunt, brute force before pulling out abruptly, Peter’s fingers curling what tiny amount they can in order to carve away at more soft parts of him.

Two things occur to Jon, not willingly, not particularly quick. First, that he’s still not bleeding enough, and second that this is the continued opposite of how these things are meant to go; the gel and fat that’s most of what’s being inelegantly scraped out onto his face being habitually left in, for people losing eyes under more normal circumstances, in the name of minimizing the apparent damage—of leaving them with a face that still looks roughly like the face that had their eyes in it.

He supposed that’s the point, and then he chokes on the thought.

Even if he could somehow get the idea of what he _looks_ like by proxy, Jon certainly wouldn’t be able to do that _now_ , with the dull empty throbbing of the wounds eclipsing half the world and what consciousness he has for himself singed by the lancing pains of every time he Knows a little bit extra. All he can feel is that it’s wrong.

Peter pulls almost all of the way out—Jon thinks he’s got his fingertips on either side of the entry wound, he _thinks_ that’s more than the pain of it existing, he’s almost sure—and makes a contemplative noise. Then he shoves his fingers in again at a different, deeper angle, scissoring, if only just, in a space that hardly allows it. Like he’s testing how much room there’d be inside of Jon with the parts that make him what he is fully removed.

“Now, if it were me,” Peter says, barely audible over the psychosomatic low drone of panic and the quiet sounds of wet violence that fill the empty places in Jon’s skull. “If it were _just_ me, I’d already have figured I’d done enough. But!” His fingers _twist_ on the way out, this time, and Jon cries out, and Peter talks over him. “It’s not that simple for you, is it? With everything you’ve survived already…”

He’s right, is maybe the worst part. Jon hadn’t given this much detailed thought to what it would mean, anatomically speaking, but he’d at least begun to think about his own—the Archivist’s, his whole fucking hubristic contention here having been that the two things could be separated in the first place, that enough of anything else to separate had survived and woken up—resilience, so to speak. He’d thought about _just_ blinding himself and then the damage healing, and then he’d thought about (like a morbid sort of flinch) what might grow back if he did try to take his own eyes out and managed it imperfectly and something got creative instead, and then he’d actually even managed to stop thinking about it before he made himself sick. Jon could have known, probably did know, enough from that to know he couldn’t actually go through with any of it beforehand. He’d just…

“You’d have wanted to be _sure_ ,” Peter says.

When his fingers bottom out at last, knuckles ungently shoved against Jon’s cheekbone, Jon doesn’t feel anything break. There is no sense of something delicate splintering, no sharp, different, differentiating pain.

This is novel, and the novelty is worse for what it implies: for the first time, Jon’s knowing of the damage exceeds the sensory input it can cause. Even when Jon thinks he might feel the impact of knuckles on the raw mess of meat inside of him, shifting that suggests Peter’s moving his fingers in the negligible amount of space there is for them to move at all, there is no new and different pain to go with it. Jon Knows why and feels some element of resistance that he still had left in him go slack with the hopeless despair of it, because that strobing pulse of Knowing on empty is the only thing his brain can feel as a thing in itself, even as that paper-thin layer of bone is broken into the surface of it.

He only realizes he’d hit the point of shock where his whole body trembled (which really couldn’t have helped, he thinks dully, as if help were something that existed for him) once it’s stopped. There’s a sort of thick and glassy barrier settling between him and the idea of agency, even as he also goes involuntarily still, though that does nothing to give him any sense that this—or the combined pangs of migraine and starvation that characterize his continued understanding of what is being done to him—is meaningfully distant from him in the kinds of ways that might help him bear the experience.

It seems wrong, somehow. That this level of damage should be possible without any sense of touch to go with it at all. There’s just the wet friction along Peter’s fingers, no sense of the bone that motion serves to splinter to match.

Jon feels him pull out, of course. But it takes him a moment to notice the direction the movement is in now, a longer one to believe it.

Peter wipes his fingers off on the inside of Jon’s slack, open mouth, and gets his jaw shut and held in place before Jon actually realizes that’s what just happened, before he starts to gag. Jon buckles forward into Peter’s grip on his face, as much of a struggle as he’s generally managed thus far, making muffled noises of new panic, and only eventually swallows; but he doesn’t want to actually retch on top of—everything, and…

And the disgust is a largely informed quality, as gut-wrenching of one as it is (which somehow only makes him feel sicker). For the most part it’s just a jelly sort of texture, and the incongruously bright taste of meat and salt. A little more blood, possibly, but still far less than there should have been. If he wanted to pay more attention, then there are scraps like skin that might be gristly remnants of something more substantial—but then he’s done and that’s done and Peter’s thumbing casually over Jon’s lips when he finally lets him go.

“Oh, come on now,” Peter says, scolding, “that's nothing.”

Jon’s reeling more than a bit, swallowing with his tongue pressed hard to the roof of his mouth and the tip compulsively scanning the backs of his teeth anyway; trying to remember how to make this normal enough to stop _thinking_ about. Reeling more physically as well, when Peter’s let go of his face and hair both and it’s suddenly all on Jon to keep his balance; staying upright does prove easier than choosing what he thinks about, or thinking, but it's a matter of shivery uncertainty and the room lurches violently around him nonetheless.

“I wouldn't actually mind feeding you all of it, I suppose, but that was _nothing_ ,” Peter goes on—almost thoughtfully—which makes it just that much more difficult for Jon to think about literally anything more bearable, “and I'm not going to. So it's fine!”

Jon considers unsticking his jaw enough to ask if he's meant to be thankful (he is, strictly speaking, now that the concept’s been introduced, because the prompt means he can't help but imagine; fingers thrust as far into his mouth as they'd gone into his—former—eye, thrusting wetly over the back of his tongue to force the extra evidence of this mutilation down Jon’s throat, and the idea alone is vivid enough to make him swallow so he doesn't gag; which, he supposes grimly, is in line with the sort of thing Peter seems to _like_ ), and doesn't so much think better of it as fail not to. Too much of his attention, for one thing, is still fixed on staying roughly upright. He lists forward like trauma’s driven the bones out of him whenever he lets his attention drift too far from instead holding so rigidly still it hurts as a thing in itself.

“Anyway, I've got a _much_ better idea,” Peter says.

Somehow Jon doubts this.

He doesn't say that either, though; finds himself distracted, before he can make the poor choice that so easily presents itself, by the fact that Peter’s hands are moving, as he shifts his weight. It’s oddly difficult to follow the motion, takes up far too much of his mind to have to try.

Jon quite literally hasn’t had cause to look past the tip of his own nose since before… before; it’s more than obvious enough now, particularly with his still being stuck on his knees meaning Jon’s approximately at eye level, but he has no actual idea how long Peter had already been hard. This didn’t seem like the sort of interaction where sexual assault was on the menu, Jon thinks, more than a bit stupidly even for his current frame of reference; although, the kneeling, he supposes, and—it’s not like Jon is notably adept at understanding these things, in general; and he _is_ a monster—that’s becoming unambiguous enough now.

“I could say I decided to do this to make sure there’s _consequences_ to your nonsense here as well. You know, so the lesson really sticks,” Peter says, spreading the slick, gleaming mess that’s still left on his palm over his cock with a lazy sort of sigh. “But honestly, it is just for my sake.”

At first Jon thinks that Peter wants his mouth if he wants anything, and he— he can do that, he thinks? He thinks. Lets his mouth go slack, which is hardly a difficult proposition, to preempt whatever it would occur to Peter to do about opening it. He can do this. He prefers breathing but he doesn't _have_ to. As long as it would mean nothing else going in the hole he _shouldn’t_ have in his face…

He keeps that tiny relative hope of reprieve right up to the point that Peter shifts them entirely the wrong way and Jon discovers, in its place, the bizarre skipping, stinging drag of sensation of what he distantly suspects is precome smeared into open wounds, as Peter runs the head of his dick across the edge of Jon’s open socket. Almost teasing. 

“Don’t think I don't appreciate the, well, the implied offer? Maybe another time, I think. But you've got a perfectly good hole right there you're not using for _anything_ ,” he adds, like that's any help or explanation.

Jon disagrees, to say the least, and even the flashes of incredulity and sardonicism crystallize into further staccato panic. “It's— It’s not— You can’t be serious, it’s h-hardly like that, l-l-like it would fit, though, you _can’t_ …” Though Jon’s breath is taken by the simultaneously incoherent and visceral mental image of if Peter _could_ , trying and very much failing not to imagine how much damage it would do by the time he actually bottomed out. If they're the same sort of thing and Jon’s the only one here who’s more than half-killed himself about it, if Peter— forced the issue, would his body just… fold? Surely it wouldn't be pleasant for anyone involved, and that's almost definitely enough to dissuade Peter (he hopes), but would it be _possible_?

“You know, I'm really not sure whether to take that as an insult or be flattered?” Peter tilts Jon’s head slightly with the hand in his hair, like that will help him consider the question somehow. “I do know what I’m doing, Archivist.”

Jon doubts this _very_ much. His head spins with perfectly undesirable Knowledge—slowly, now, but crystal clear and pressing, as clean and cogent as his own thoughts aren’t—but it’s like he can’t quite face up to any given idea fully for long enough to reach the end of its respective mental sentence. He Knows a little about lobotomies, about the damage that can be expected from going in through the eye in traditionally subtler ways; then he stops. He wonders (Peter _couldn’t_ get his hips flush to Jon’s face, he couldn’t, it’s physically impossible; right?) the wrong thing for long enough to Know other things, about how eminently possible it is for the mass of the brain to be shoved down and out toward the spine because something in that delicate balance of space has gone wrong. (Chiari, he thinks, for a little involuntary whine for his troubles. Hardly useful to Know but it hurts him so it comes unasked, with flickers of greater detail that don’t quite find purchase. Enough do, of course.) Starts to wonder, maybe, if the Eye would deign to heal it or just— leave him, it’s not like people don’t live like that, what if—what if he _stays like this_ —

Then he thinks about nothing whatsoever, not even a little, just a solid wall of hot, dark negation, because Peter’s gone through whatever patience had him hesitating and stuck his fucking dick in Jon’s eye socket.

It’s significantly worse than his fingers. Until a moment ago Jon had not expected ‘worse than fingers’ to be a bloody _option_ , but here it is: the way the pressure on all sides leaves not the slightest possibility of Jon managing to not feel somewhere, the head of Peter’s cock seemingly sucked in to the hot, tight hole that’s left, a thought-terminating cacophony of stinging, lancing pain with every drag of skin on absence-of-skin. 

There’s an experimental edge to as Peter starts to move, more jerking himself off into the hole he’s put in Jon than fucking it as impossibly as Jon had feared. It’s hardly a source of consolation, Jon’s head jarred almost imperceptibly—save, of course, through the rhythmic extra pain—with even that level of motion, enough for the parts that used to be his eyelids to get their own discrete sense of abrasion going. He can’t hear anything over the way the excess pain attempts to resolve into a tinnitus whine that fails to drown out the _mundanely_ recognizable meaty sounds of a wet hole getting fucked; can barely feel the rest of his body in a way that matters, so Jon only realizes that he’s begging Peter to stop again when his understanding of his body syncs up enough for Jon to realize that’s the rhythm to which Peter’s been timing the strokes as he jacks himself off with progressively less hesitation. Because of _fucking course_ it is.

Jon musters the will to lock his jaw shut out of sheer spite, even managing to grind his teeth in a marginally effective counterpoint to the— to everything else. He needs to breathe or think significantly less than he needs to hate, it feels like, and for at very least a moment that’s even enough.

“Oh, you can _definitely_ keep that up, you know,” Peter says, as soon as he does. With a delighted, conspiratorial edge, “Does it hurt?”

Of course it bloody hurts, and if Jon could he'd snap an insult instead of finding himself run out of explicit defiance already, now helplessly cataloguing how individual muscles in his cheek jump with mindless attempts to close something, to have anything to close. His mouth has dropped open yet again, momentary sense of agency all but forgotten. Without meaningful amounts movement, finally, as Peter seems to get the hang of holding him still in increments, agony sits inside his skull like molten lead, like radioactive waste, hot and heavy and consuming, corroding everything it can touch. The room spins around it, reduced to the vaguest of dizzy suggestion, any effort Jon can make to think outside the pain rewarded only in swooping, incoherent feelings of confusion and loss.

At least Peter doesn't push back any further into the space he'd ravaged open with his fingers. That is, until he does. Just a bit, but that’s hardly how Jon’s thinking about it when that wet fleshy _sliding_ feeling manages to reignite the tripwires of panic he's got for a nervous system, the fear from knowing that this incalculable damage still really could get worse sparking new. If he makes a sound—a high, thready whine of truly pathetic panic seems likely overall—he only feels it; his throat’s raw even to air, but that just means the off-and-on grinding counterpoints of pain there might just be Jon breathing.

“Oh,” Peter breathes, a bizarre edge of honest vulnerability under the shallow bright surface, half like it’s been punched out of him, “excellent. There we go.”

“No—n-no, please, don’t—” Jon finds his voice, finds enough wherewithal that he tries to pull back again, somehow, or— he wants to try, it doesn’t seem to be happening. Aside from the pain his body feels like a stranger to him.

“There you are! I almost thought I might've lost you for a minute there. Which is hardly appropriate. Can’t have you checking out on me, right?”

Jon doesn’t want to dignify that with a response, or tries to believe that’s why he’s managing all of nothing. He feels a distant kind of irritation, like there’s not room in his head for any more novel emotion than that, too much eaten up by pain and damage Jon can’t ever quite manage to drift away from.

At this point Peter’s shoved one leg between Jon’s thighs by effective necessity, more than uncomfortably close, so even if Jon could marshal the coordination needed he wouldn't be able to get his hands up between them to try at shoving Peter away. He tries anyway, or thinks about trying, but it's like he can't hold even as simple a thought beyond observation as basic fight or flight instinct for long enough to act on it. What should be the intent to struggle disappears into shocky, content-free static halfway down his arms, vanished just like that into the general incoherent tremulous sketch that's the closest Jon gets to being able to feel most of his body. He can't even muster the chance to fail.

When Peter lets Jon’s head loll forward just a bit too far he does, in fact, scream.

“Ah! Careful there, Archivist,” Peter says, from what’s briefly brought close by panic and will soon be far away. He sounds just a bit breathless, but Jon can hear the fucking smile, unchanged. “Don’t get carried away now.” But he does readjust his grip on Jon’s hair to something more secure—accordingly more painful—Jon probably manages not to be grateful, if only because that thought seems terribly complicated for him.

Jon doesn't ask anything, can't—he begs in fits and starts that slide blearily into one another, but that's different—and Peter keeps up commentary accordingly. It is distinctly positive, in an impossible-to-want sort of way. All praise for the wet, ruined void he barely rocks his dick into, now rhythmic and shallow and steady; and for Jon himself, apparently, for _how well he takes it._

Which sinks cold barbs into Jon’s lungs and pulls back the odd despairing whine, for all that he thinks, when he can pull together the thought, that this is probably the point. Jon can't imagine (he's admittedly in very poor condition to try) what other way he could—take it _than_ this, which is to say helpless and speared open with his body gone slack and cold, but the implication that there is one demands that he wonder about it. Whether there was a way Jon could have made doing this to him unappealing. What _exactly_ Jon had done to make the idea of, of fucking the socket once Peter was done all but clawing his eye out intuitive in the first place, because he still can't understand the reason but when he's caught between soft squelching noises on one side of his ear and warm, horribly earnest _ah, fuck, that’s very good, Archivist_ on the other Jon’s more than resigned to the understanding that there _is_ one. And the less he understands about the motive, the more…

Peter’s free enough with the descriptions, and if there's not much to be said without repeating himself then Jon’s also not exactly doing the best job of listening. The gestalt makes it through, how hot and slick the inside of Jon’s body is for him, desire and design both irrelevant. Or rather far from irrelevant, but in the opposite of any way Jon could conceivably (as metaphorical as the prospect of such a coherent individual thought is getting) _want_ ; Peter doesn't have to quite say outright that he gets off on the begging as well. That much is obvious even to Jon by now, and yet he can't seem to make himself stop. The words run out into what cut-up noises are left to him, and then, with some encouragement, into words again, and back.

After some uncertain infinity of time Peter comes with a choppy, satisfied breath that isn’t quite a moan; and Jon _feels_ it, still, what should be sensory overload here be damned. The hot pulse of come flooding his eye socket; the way some manages to drip into the back of his mouth, mostly, the harsh backward tilt of Jon’s neck an infinitesimal sort of mercy as come splashes from his eye socket into his sinuses, insinuating itself down toward his throat; bad enough to have to swallow against it almost as decisively as Jon imagines he might have done if Peter had just fucked his mouth the more prosaic way instead. How more slips back out onto Jon’s face, forced out around Peter’s cock as he works himself through his orgasm, thick hot fluid that stings everywhere Jon’s more open wound than anything else. And Jon’s aware, even more than before, of how little space there actually is inside him, in his skull, for all that he feels literally and figuratively like a hollow thing. If there were more he wouldn't feel this hotly stuffed _full_ in a way independent of the pain; he'd be able, maybe, to breathe.

Peter pulls out, all the way, at last (to more… wet miscellany dripping down Jon’s cheek, and far, far too much of it still inside him), and clicks his tongue, considering. “You know, I’d want you to clean this up,” he says—teases the slick head of his softening dick against Jon’s mostly-closed mouth, as a clarification Jon honestly did kind of need; and when Jon realizes he’d almost let his mouth fall back open on reflex anyway it feels, dimly, like it does when he thinks about dying—“but that’s a bit beyond you right now, isn’t it? But that’s all right. You've done well enough, really, all things considered.”

The ostensible leniency that implies turns out to consist of smearing the worst of it off on the other side of Jon’s face instead, come and whatever further remains of Jon’s eye re-wetting the dried tears there. It occurs to him through a thick haze that he’s presumably closer to symmetrical, now, in one deeply superficial way.

His eyes— _eye_ —Jon’s eye refuses to focus on anything in particular, and there’s that low drone in the back of his skull again, setting Jon more adrift from the present just as he’d briefly touched it. He feels ruined and broken and filthy, patchwork awareness of his body paradoxically warm and lax and wet and freezing stiff at the same time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3/3 ETA this weekend! (Spoiler alert: Jon feels better and doesn’t like it.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fills `Depraved & Psychotic`. (No one is actually psychotic, but I’m sure you can imagine what the censors would say about the Archivist’s response to would-be irreparable mortal harm.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I should warn for the amount of self-loathing kinkshaming Jon gets in here. "Ace subtype: not at all happy with the cumulative effects of his patron god on sexuality", like.
> 
> (Words used by Jon’s narration for his anatomy: clit/cunt, in case this matters to you. Nonspecific language from Peter this time.)

Jon doesn't feel the bone reform inside his face, gradually teasing itself out of the surface of his brain at first, delicate lattices knitting themselves impossibly, thankfully back together. It’s less that he still doesn’t have the right kind of nerves there, really, more that the first trickle of Knowing doesn’t quite connect, not before that slow reforming process has progressed to other bone shards easing themselves out of marginally less vital and much more tactile broken-open flesh. Even that Jon notices more by a slow building pressure and sense of movement, something that feels hardly separate from the ongoing sick dizzy lurch of still being conscious, pulling all his attention inward for little useful result. Parts of his body feel warm instead of pain or prickling near-numbness, seemingly at random.

“Look at it this way. You’ve learned your lesson, as intended,” Peter is saying. His voice seems to fade in and out, which Jon largely takes in stride on the assumption it’s all him. Right up until his hand’s on Jon’s face, smearing drying blood and wet, wet vitreous humor and Peter’s own come. Wiping it off? No, curling his fingers across Jon’s cheek and then superficially into the dull and confused agony of the still-emptied socket, like he’s… what is he doing?

Jon thinks he manages a confused kind of sound, but that might be in his head. He doesn’t recoil. He seems to have lost the knack.

“I wouldn’t want learning to be a solely negative experience,” Peter goes on, virtually nonsense. “That just doesn’t seem right, not to me.”

Under the wave of nausea, of equally slick and hot and insidious disgust, as Peter apparently decides he’s gathered up enough of the evidence of his orgasm and Jon’s eye for his own inscrutable purposes and Jon fails to pull away from the lingering touches to his ruined face, Jon wonders dimly _why_ exactly Peter’s doing that. Then he wonders why Peter’s knelt to put himself more or less on Jon’s level in the first place, and possibly when.

Then he gets answers, somewhat, in the form of Peter matter-of-factly going on to open Jon’s trousers with his off hand, making enough room to slip the other into Jon’s pants and make a fair start on insinuating his fingers between the lips of Jon’s otherwise-defenseless cunt before Jon can muster even the actual, appropriate horror. Before he can make sense of it in more than jolts of sensation—jolts of what is suddenly much more sensation, his thoughts grinding once more to a halt. He doesn’t understand. He can’t breathe. He doesn’t understand and he can’t breathe—

And Jon hates himself for it, immediately, breathlessly, but even if the slick pressure weren’t _good_ it would be _something new_ and so his hips jerk forward once before he freezes, the near-hypersensitive head of his clit throbbing as the hood’s pulled back and the bare flesh drags against the warm and near-frictionless wet of Peter’s fingers. Demanding his attention even once he’s still, a sick and intoxicating datapoint, the first time he’s felt something other than his eye actually matter since all this began and without the grace to hurt with how it repulses him, all heady and dissonant warmth.

(Why was he—is he—getting _hard_ — Jon reels with that almost more than with wondering what the hell Peter’s doing now; at least the latter isn’t his fault but what is _wrong_ with him—)

Peter fairly beams at him, which is as awful up close as Jon would have expected. Even aside from the context his—transparently genuine—expressions seem… wrong, somehow. “Glad to see you're on board!”

“I'm n— I'm n-not,” Jon says, words lurching toward gasps, humiliation almost as wrenching as any pain has been—and a novelty besides—washing over him. “I'm not, I don't understand— I don't _want_ —” That’s hardly different from anything else that’s happened to him, and they both know it. The way his thighs spread even wider without Peter actually having to make them, pressing forward all but voluntarily into his hand, feels just as inevitable as everything else.

“There's no shame in it,” Peter says, patronizing; and patently false, but Jon’s sure he'd know that, is making it worse on purpose. “It’s just in your nature, really, right?” Overall poor angle (isn’t it?) that he’s at aside, Jon dimly notes that Peter moves like he has practice, confident and terribly effective in how his fingers work Jon’s clit and hint at dipping lower.

“No, I don't, I'm not, please—” It’s not actually surprising to Jon that this is the most articulate of plea (which isn't that high a distinction) he’s managed in quite a bit, nor does he think of the ability to notice that itself as a good sign; but there’s… something, the ability to think in multiple directions undermining him when he tries to ignore these sensations, hips hitching occasionally as something dark and hot and heady builds there faster than it has any right to. “ _God,_ ” he chokes out before he manages getting back in the neighborhood of sentences. Then, desperately, “Please, I d-d-don’t _want_ this, I, I—”

“I'm well aware of that by now, Archivist! But you will enjoy it. Promise. And it's like I said earlier. Remember? We both know no one's ever cared about what you want. Probably not even you.”

By the time Peter says that, he’s slipped his hand further down, enough that he’s got one large finger beginning, gradual but undeniably so, to coax its way inside him. With significantly more finesse than when else Peter had stuck it in him, really—almost incidental, like it could practically be a natural consequence of how Jon by now can't make himself hold still for more than a second. Jon doesn't think he likes the difference. Doesn't like how easily his body opens and wouldn't even if it didn't net him more commentary Jon only catches the tail end of, focused at first on the slick, incremental stretch, the way Peter’s hand shifts until it’s more the heel of it that’s pressing up against Jon’s clit and rubbing almost aimlessly. It’s all too slow not to leave him hyperfocused on every motion, and he _aches_ with it.

“—be all that surprised you take this well, too,” Peter’s saying when Jon remembers it's about him, “you know, since being a hole is what you’re for in the first place.”

“ _No_ ,” Jon says, catches the edge of something else in his voice as Peter works another finger into the hot wet mess of him. He’s tight enough for this to take his breath away and not enough for it to do him any good and that doesn’t seem fair, somehow, on a ridiculous existential level, far away from the now-steady rhythm Jon’s hips have settled into absent any input on his part, matching the involuntary clench and release of his cunt. It’s hardly any help knowing the motions are too small to see; if Jon can feel it, there’s no hoping Peter can’t.

Peter makes a pleased, smug kind of sound as if to rub it in, rocking his hand in easy counterpoint to the motion as Jon bends helplessly towards him.

When he sways forward too far beyond that Peter catches him by the back of the neck; mostly, at any rate, given his hand spans round to the side too. Enough for his thumb to hook around Jon’s pulse, another beat for Jon to be aware of— the same one, really, the fast but steady rhythm of his own heart setting the pace at which the soft and open blood-flushed parts of him throb.

Jon thinks dully that, were it possible to truly cancel for pain, he'd be hard-pressed to choose a winner in terms of _wrongness_. He doesn’t want to compare the experiences but it’s hardly something he can stop when they’re lined up this neat, the same two fingers searching inside Jon’s body, thrust with relative ease into one too-slick hole he’d never want anything to go and then the next. How the painful tension of trying to hold himself still and minimize the damage earlier compares against the outright failure that is his hips squirming against a hand achingly present in all directions, unable for the obvious reason to find any motion that would let him pull away. Not entirely able to stop trying, either, even when another unsteady lurch out of delirious pain and back into lucidity lets it occur to him that he’s just fucking himself on Peter’s fingers more and more openly in the attempt.

“Think you’ll want another?” Peter asks, like he could tell— no, he couldn’t, surely; he’s just responding to how much Jon’s acclimatized to this physically, the increased ease of how his fingers move.

Jon pulls himself together enough to manage thinking of a moment later than this one, tries to actually consider it. More specifically, he tries to consider what he can say that will stop him. If he can say anything that will stop him.

Peter spreads his fingers experimentally, testing how far they can go, and it jerks a sharp noise out of Jon.

“D-Don’t,” he manages, gasping, all sophisticated thoughts a lost cause. “Christ— th-that’s enough, don’t— no more. Please.”

“You sure that’s what you want?” Peter asks, sounding critical. Disappointed, almost.

“ _Yes,_ ” Jon says.

He’s already figured himself as having lost when it seems Peter’s pretending to really consider— something, but the man still manages to surprise him. “I don’t believe you.”

“Wh—” Jon swallows, tries again. “What?”

“You’ve got that _nasty_ habit of self-denial, that’s why you starved yourself to be weak enough to let me do this in the first place,” he says, horribly reasonable. “I’m not sure you’re capable of being honest with yourself about what you could actually enjoy. So I’m perfectly sure you wouldn’t be honest with me.”

“I said no,” Jon says, stupidly, before he thinks better of it. Moving his face makes him think of the sticky layers of dried blood and… company thereof that drag with his skin when he speaks, instead of how Peter’s wasted no time getting a third finger up to brush casually against the base of the other two. Presumably it’s both the thick fingers splitting him open already, come and at least a bit of slick and quite a lot of something else making it lewdly simple, that make it seem attainable, like he could just slip it inside. Surely Jon’s body isn’t that open and easy by default. Surely.

“That’s my point exactly,” Peter says. He sounds so blandly pleased with himself. Like they have come to an agreement, instead of him fitting the first knuckle of that third finger into Jon as he speaks, a bright sparking play of sensation that snaps all his attention to that unreasonable and perfectly accommodating stretch. “It’s how I know I’ve got the right idea,” he says, thrusting all three fingers in at once, the digits broad and crooked into a wicked curve, and Jon keens, argument nightmarishly beyond him as his body jerks.

“Bit hard for you to get all the way there, isn’t it?” Peter says offhandedly. “That’s all right,” he adds, of course only after reintroducing the suggestion that Jon’s not even managing to _competently_ be whatever kind of— perverted freak as could be made to like this. After providing another point against Jon’s barely-conscious hope that he can just stop being an interesting victim eventually. _He’s_ never felt there’s much innovation or variety to how he reacts to pain and violation, anyway.

Jon’s good eye’s watering again, he thinks; there’s a kind of whimpering, hitching moan he could suppose for his own dignity could pass for a more pitiable-but-not-depraved pained sob, if someone were listening. If someone were listening and cared.

If someone were listening, and cared, and wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt in terms of what they thought they were hearing.

“You know,” Peter says conversationally, “I have to tell you, I almost wish I were up to go another round. I’m not as young as you are, you understand. But you’re _very_ much worth the effort to get you squirming on my fingers like this, Archivist, hole that you are, and it’s just only natural I’m thinking about what this tight little thing could do on my cock, wouldn’t you think?”

Jon’s not all that sure if he shakes his head in obvious denial or if he just thinks about it very hard. Thinks about how much—how little—say he gets. Thinks about how utterly unable he is to judge one extreme or the other.

Thinks about how utterly fucked he’d be as far as any attempt to avert a more mundane repeat performance.

“Little thing like you, extenuating circumstances aside, you already pulled the short straw as far as stamina, huh? At this rate I’d be surprised if you can keep it together long enough to make yourself come, if you’re just like this. Must be a sorry combination to live with, but I’ve got time.” There’s that false reassurance that Jon shouldn’t be affected by—he _wants_ Peter to get fed up and stop, wants no part of this—and that still crawls under Jon’s sternum and stays for later, a mundane kind of insecurity he’d not given thought to until Peter brought it up.

He wonders if he’d be able to be less present, less relentlessly _aware_ , if Peter were back to using Jon’s body to get himself off, if instead of clever flexible fingers he was split open on the brute-force instrument by comparison of his dick again. More. If that would qualify as some kind of reprieve. He’s grimly sure it wouldn’t, though, as the imagined prospect takes still-hazy explicit form, even putting aside—well—current evidence indicates that he could make Jon come on his cock just fine if he’d wanted. And he hadn’t. No way out there, twice over.

“So presumably I can count on if I just leave you laid out on the floor here you couldn’t _not_ stay nicely long enough for one of your people to find you like that. Wouldn’t want me to be the only one to get to see the picture you’d make—it’s a pity but that’s all right, I get it—you’d think it was a waste, right, the way you work? Not to get yourself _seen_ like that by someone who _didn’t_ expect it, get to make them know what you looked like fucked out and gaping and dripping my come out both ends, without _you_ lifting a finger to make them. You’d love that too much to miss out on it.”

Jon’s skin prickles with what must be revulsion, at how much fun Peter’s audibly having with all his indulgent detail if nothing else. He doesn’t say anything cutting about that, or try to, though; doesn’t say anything at all. Because his mind’s snagged on imagining someone (Martin— not Martin, not Martin) stood stock still in the doorway, the kind of look in their eyes he can barely guess at as they raked unwillingly up and down his body, and it’s not fucking _fair_ for Peter to know to go there and Jon to listen and he doesn’t want it and he _doesn’t_ but God, _fuck_ — He squeezes his good eye shut and feels the other still fail to follow suit but that’s not enough to ground him as he feels his head loll back and he _whines_.

“Knew it,” Peter says, blandly pleased, and Jon’s got his eye closed because he’s still within the brief sort of interval he can do that kind of thing but he can still all but _feel_ the smile in how Peter’s hand picks up the pace, slight but noticeable, Jon playing into his hands or the fantasy or both giving him renewed enthusiasm that translates to the same three fingers seeming to punch the breath out of him.

Jon should be— it’s no contest with his head, but he should be getting sore, shouldn’t he? He just feels _filled_ , hot and sensitized and twisted in reward for it. Almost, between the sick warm ache ebbing from the wet mess of his face and the slick, demanding heat of his cunt—like any of him actually wants Peter’s fingers there—not sated, but differently full, almost as unambiguously a good thing. His body feels solid, feels present, feels _alive_ in a way it hasn’t since…

“Ah, you know, it's just as well I won't,” Peter goes on, voice shifting from relish back to jarringly incongruous reasonableness, once he’s blatantly let the idea sink in. “It’s not that you wouldn’t love it once you let yourself, but it’s a bit, well… mixed messages, you understand. Wouldn’t want to give you the excuse not to enjoy your reward and all that. This is about _you_ , right now. But maybe some other time!”

Jon more or less tries to let that go by him, the alternative of thinking about how other parts of him felt about the prospect completely out of the question. Specific rebuttals seem far beyond him, anyway; but Jon begs him to stop, still, even now, even after that and undeniably fucking himself on Peter’s hand, his voice getting stronger in increments. Jon begs him to stop and Peter seems to treat it like a challenge, or an invitation, even more than he had been before, seemingly delighted at each _No_ twisted off into a moan. At some point he gets enough motor control back for one of his hands to find Peter’s shoulder for support as his spine bows and his thighs shake; somehow this isn’t enough control, conversely, to drag that hand back down.

It’s not as strange as it should be that he’s making almost the same noises, and not as distracting as it ought to be that the full-body jerk gives him a hollow kind of whiplash where his eye isn’t. The feeling of movement inside his face should be sickening, or at least grounding somewhat, but it's finally, blessedly all _outward_ , new and rebuilt tissue slowly forcing its way into available space and refusing to feel wrong. The pain is ebbing steadily to something bearable from where it had seared itself into his orbital bones, easing slowly from utter violation to merely the hot, sore strain of a body well-used. And against the gradual recession of pain Jon’s body keeps responding, slow, radiating heat unsteadily traversing his face to ease away terror he'd honestly almost rather have to keep him grounded than feel this reprieve; then lower, unloosening his lungs until the sharp irregular breaths Jon pulls in, on reflex and to make noise he's barely interested in with, are full and deep again.

There’s a terribly doable stretch to this part: three fingers not scissoring, not working to open any more space inside him, less thrusting than just crooked and pressing unrelenting steady patterns in counterpoint to the equally relentless but far more generalized pressure on the inside of his face. Arousal curls slowly up Jon’s spine in infinitesimal little increments, as he ignores the sounds pushed out of him each time Peter hits one of those angles that tear through him like a second-long snapshot of an orgasm.

Alongside it, harder to ignore, is relief: its own kind of awful lassitude, anchoring Jon in his body, against all odds still relaxing and warm. He is going to survive this intact in the ways that actually matter. The rest is memory, horrifying and unique and _his_ (and, he presumes, thoroughly witnessed), and in that sense he can’t but almost welcome it, one more awful thing to tuck safely away inside him once it’s over. The relief lets his body lean further into the present, demands it, keeps him attentive with the promise every moment is more bearable than the last. To a certain extent Jon really _isn’t_ sure why he hasn’t come yet, what perverse incentive it is this time that’s keeping him wound tight and increasingly aware of it, the pleasure having largely plateaued at a higher level of intensity than Jon would have thought he could actually bear.

There’s something sick and heady about knowing how many decisions this has made _for_ him, the future horrors finally and fully taken out of his control as much as his body’s been. That he wouldn’t have had the stomach to blind himself, with or without Martin, no matter what he told himself he wanted, _and_ that it wouldn’t work, that he’s survived beyond that kind of damage mattering for longer than it takes to comprehend the hurt. That he’s so terribly certain he won’t be able to bring himself to actively resist what comes next.

Jon’s very much aware of what fuels him, and how ragged he’d been running himself already. That he hadn’t had any remaining margin for error before.

There are parts of this Jon thinks he understands. Tearing his eye out, however violently, was meant to prove a point. (And it did, Jon’s mind adds reflexively when even the ghost of the question could present itself—skipping and stuttering like there's any actual safety risk there, like _Peter_ is anything who'd actually get to know if Jon thought otherwise—but it did, _god,_ it did, he did.) Fucking the hole afterwards was… unintuitive, to say the least, but once Jon concedes _that_ it happened the answer to what Peter was getting out of it is more than obvious.

This he understands far, far less, the occasional insight into what else Peter’s thinking about hardly enlightening contrast. It’s not like he has any particular reason to want to… to watch Jon come, is it? And Jon’s— failing, his mind skipping tracks to the stomach-turning not-pain and the arousal winding itself hot and tight just below in turn, to imagine what else someone could want. There’s not much room left in him for going further afield of that in terms of imagination.

There’s not much room left in him for anything; it feels like the increasingly cohesive moans he can’t bring himself to catalog are forced out of him by that sort of physical inevitability, like the lost-cause miscellanies that cleared his eye socket and trickled down his face as the tissues reformed, not a reaction but simple displacement. (He felt the tapetum a human wouldn’t have pull itself together, oddly elastic—sealing the new and vulnerable flesh and nerves off, although he knows what little that means. Still there’s relief.) He’s felt, as if in some freakish harmony with the way his body hangs and stutters at the edge of what is by now an obvious and almost-welcome orgasm, himself become meaningfully real again. He’s so close he can’t fucking _stand it_ , except—

He can feel his other eye trying to close when his good eyelids flutter. He can feel it, less sick mockery and more line-of-best-fit approximation, as the part of him that matters builds itself from concavity, and it’s obvious, actually, that what he was waiting for is—

Jon shuts both his eyes. Both of them. Something more comparable than not to a twisted echo of how it feels when the Eye takes him every night lances through him, all heat and light, as he opens them immediately; he comes with his eyes open. It’s all he needed. It’s everything he needs.

It escapes him if he screams. He feels like a bloody full-body scream, tearing out of him to its end.

At some point in the subsequent time Jon largely loses, dizzy and with ringing ears and unsure for a much more _natural_ reason how exactly his legs should work, face dirty but fresh and whole and his whole body from missing ribs to knee throbbing with hot aftershocks—well—he’s not particularly equipped to tell when Peter leaves or where he fucks off to, even aside from the obvious reasons it’s a hopeless thing to try.

Good riddance, Jon thinks. But it falls a bit flat.

He’s sprawled on the floor. He stares at the ceiling. His new eye is still a little dry.

Cleaning himself up seems like it will take some grand level of executive strategy he’s not sure if he’s up to yet. And he’s not as willing now to think about what debt he’s racked up to his own existence, what his first order of business will have to be once he’s presentable as human again.

But after, he thinks, in spite of himself almost; yes. After, he thinks he’s going to talk to Melanie about quitting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took over a year to write. Why am I like this. (Kinkmeme commenter response was invaluable and the opportunity to make it a BTB thing was the final kick in the pants that worked! But man, those timestamps.)
> 
> A friend asked if Elias was watching. I would think the answer goes without saying, really.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, primary motivation, excitedly, etc. (If you read this on the kinkmeme first, thank you for your patience, you’re my hero.)


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